China has hurt its technological and economic edge, but private Taiwan companies stand to come out ahead.
National Interest
Date: September 20, 2020
By: Patrick Mendis Hon-Min Yau
Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part series; you can find the first part here.
It is obvious that the Sino-American tech war is an extension of realist politics and is part of the Republican re-election campaign to portrait its leader as the Teflon president. The strategic competition between the Trump administration and the Communist Party of China (CPC) in information communication and technologies industries (ICTs) is all about the dominance of who defines the nature and rules of the global game for the future governance of technology. In fact, it seems that the United States is not simply apprehensive of Huawei’s innovations and quality of products, but rather, it is concerned about China’s increasingly dominant status in the ICTs sector as it cedes to Beijing’s unique power of control through the of agenda-setting of the global politics.
For example, the development of the future mobile communication standard is led by an industrial standard-setting consortium, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, but its three most important Technical Specification Groups (TSG) are already populated with representatives from China’s enterprises. Ai Ming from Datang Mobile Communications Equipment Company Limited—funded by China’s State Council—is the vice-chairman of TSG CT (Core Network and Terminals). Huawei senior official, Georg Mayer, is the chairman of TSG SA (Service and System Aspects). Xu Xiaodong from China Mobile is the vice-chairman of TSG RAN (Radio Access Network).
Most important of all, the International Telecommunication Union is responsible for internationalizing communication standards, and its current secretary-general, Zhao Houlin, has been holding this position since 2015 with the full support from China. In response to all these perceived China threats, one of the fifty-one items on President Trump’s re-election platform announced in late August is to “win the race to 5G and establish a national high-speed wireless internet network” in his second term. (Although that plan is widely considered “as a short-term public relations ploy” to win the election.) [FULL STORY]